


give my new body a chance

by callunavulgari



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Body Modification, Found Family, Gen, Hera needs a hug, Minor Doug Eiffel/Hera, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28142019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: When they land on Earth, Hera spends a week in a box.
Relationships: Doug Eiffel/Hera, Hera & Daniel Jacobi, Hera & Isabel Lovelace, Hera & Renée Minkowski
Comments: 9
Kudos: 39
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	give my new body a chance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KiaraSayre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiaraSayre/gifts).



> Happy Yule! First thing's first - I really hope that you love this. This is basically the fic that I've been itching to write since I finished the podcast two years ago, so thank you for giving me an excuse to write it! I would also like to give a quick shout out to [Artifice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5137679) and [never tell me the odds](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18404588) because they are my absolute favorite fics in this fandom, and as they both involve Hera navigating Earth and her relationships with her favorite humans, they influenced the making of this quite a bit. And y'know, they're also both really fantastic, so if you haven't read them, you 100% should.
> 
> Also, for your consideration, [Hera.](https://blog.loish.net/post/184851394432/radioactive-locks)

When they land on Earth, Hera spends a week in a box. It isn’t an awful box. It’s the size of a freight container and barely fits in Minkowski’s backyard, but it’s still… a box. Where she once had long cool corridors, winding air ducts, and a sturdy hull, she now has this. The box. She isn’t even patched into the house properly. Her contact with the outside world is minimal at best. For all extents and purposes, she’s basically _stored hardware_ unless someone wants to come outside and sit next to her for a while. 

She pretends that it doesn’t bother her, reassures everyone that she’s fine, really she is, and besides, it’s only temporary, right? _Right_? 

Hera _trusts_ these people. They’re _her_ humans. They won’t leave her behind. They won’t.

Because the thing is - they’re trying. Hera knows that they’re trying. Eiffel is still recovering, Lovelace and Minkowski are involved in an epic shitstorm of a legal battle, she wouldn’t want Pryce within ten feet of her right now even if it was an option, and Jacobi is - well, he’s Jacobi. 

Which is why she’s surprised when he shows up a week and some change into their stay on Earth with a durable little drive in his pocket and something that’s not quite a smile on his face.

“Get in, loser,” he tells her, flipping the drive. It’s got a keychain attached to it shaped like a grenade. “We’re going shopping.”

“You know that I won’t fit in there, right?” she says, focusing her cameras on the little drive in his hands. 

It’s… a surprisingly spacious drive for being so small, with over one thousand exabytes of space available, but it still isn’t quite enough. She thinks that she could probably fit a little over half of her matrices inside, if she really, really tried. Condensed some programs here and there, saved most of herself on the box… It _could_ work. Theoretically. 

“You can fit most of you though, right?” he asks her, scuffing his feet in the grass. It’s overgrown and weedy, dandelions blanketing the lawn in yellow. No one has really had much time for mowing.

“Yeah, but-”

Jacobi grins at her, all teeth. It’s a gesture she may have found threatening months ago, when he and Maxwell were tearing around her station threatening everyone she loved, but now, she thinks it’s just his way of trying to be charming.

“C’mon, Hera,” he tells her. “Live a little.”

“Where are you going to put me?” she asks, not particularly wanting to hear the answer.

He plucks his phone from his pocket and waggles it at her. 

“Temporary,” he explains, when she makes a quiet, horrified noise. “Just until we get where we’re going.”

“And where are we going, Jacobi?” she asks.

“This is basically a _sex shop_ ,” she hisses, her voice tinny and strange over the speaker of his phone. She hears him snort, and wants desperately to zap him. Briefly, she fantasizes about liquifying his phone battery in his pocket, but well. She’s _in_ the phone.

“Nuh uh,” he tells her, wagging a finger at the phone’s camera. He’s holding the phone up like he’s facetiming someone, but judging by the way a portion of his thumb is covering the camera, she’s assuming it’s not something he does often. “Just because this kind of place has a bit of a reputation doesn’t mean that’s the _only_ thing it has going for it. Look at that model - she’s advertised as a baby sitter!”

“Yeah,” Hera murmurs mutinously. “Maybe on pornhub.”

He snorts again, and swivels the phone to face _the wall_. 

It’s an intimidating wall, packed floor to ceiling with clear, plastic boxes built specifically to better display their contents. Most of the androids - _dolls_ , the sign advertises in obnoxious, glittery font - tend to be female, well-proportioned, and overwhelmingly blonde. It’s all very Real Life Barbie and Hera is not impressed.

“I don’t know,” she tells him. Even the tamer models just aren’t… well, _her._ The problem, she thinks, zooming in on a doll that claims to be modeled after Marilyn Monroe, is that she still sees herself as the Hephaestus. She doesn’t _feel_ like any of them. 

Hera isn’t some plastic Barbie - she is hundreds of tons of sheet metal and solar panels. She’s air vents and a central processor with enough pick up and go that she could have launched them all into the damn star any time she wanted if it didn’t violate her core protocols. 

“C’mon, Hera,” Jacobi is saying, reaching out to tap the box of one of the dolls closest to them. It blinks placidly in response, thick eyelashes dragging against pale cheeks. Jacobi grimaces and steps away again. “Look, I know it’s not ideal. But don’t you think we could find you something? You can’t stay in the box forever.”

“I-”

“And _don’t_ tell me you like it in there,” he interrupts, bringing the camera up so that he can better frown into it. 

She hesitates. “It’s very… comfortable.”

“It’s a box,” he says, flatly. “You had an entire station to spread out in before. Don’t tell me you don’t miss it.”

When Hera doesn’t reply, Jacobi gives her another of his sharp grins. This one stinks of triumph.

“Okay, so maybe I do miss it,” she admits. “But it’s not like one of these things can really compare with the Hephaestus.”

He sighs. “Yeah, you got me there. But, here’s the thing. It doesn't _have_ to be forever. If you don’t like it, we can look for alternatives. I’m pretty sure we could rig some kind of set up at Minkowski’s place eventually.”

Hera thinks about that. She could have _walls_ again.

But-

“It wouldn’t be the same,” she says with a tinny little sigh. Being carted around like this is already deeply uncomfortable. It’s cramped and she can only see where he points her. They could put her in a car. A house. Another house. Hell, they could do all three. There’s another solution. There’s always another solution, but would it be a good one? 

What she’s really craving, she knows, is _freedom_. To have unfettered access to the digital world, the way she was always meant to. But humanity isn’t quite there yet. And having a body - even this kind of body, is a temporary solution. One that would offer her more freedoms than anything else. And well, she has always been curious about what it would be like.

“Yeah, okay,” she says eventually. “But not one of these. Do they have anything…” she trails off, grimacing. 

“Anything less stepford?” he finishes in a drawl, striding off down the aisles towards the back of the store. He brings the camera up to grin into it, and… it’s not that she doesn’t like Jacobi. They’ve had a prickly relationship since the start, but he’s not as bad as Hilbert. Or Kepler. He didn’t betray her the way that Maxwell had. And he’s grown on her, after months and months of getting used to his churlishness. 

But she’ll admit that there’s a part of her that wishes she were here with Eiffel. That he was the one to crack jokes about stepford wives and creepy babysitters. That he could help her pick, because he would make it fun, and she would feel less weird about it. 

Eiffel isn’t here though. Neither is Minkowski. Or Lovelace. 

Instead, she has… this. She has Jacobi, who against all odds, is actually _trying_.

Hera hums, considering. Then asks, “Do you think they have anything in blue?”

  
Learning how to walk is strange. It’s not something she’d given much thought to whenever she’d indulged herself in brief daydreams of actually doing something like walking amongst her crewmates. They made it look easy, effortless. And it’s not that she didn’t _know_ that walking was something that young humans learned, she just hadn’t given much thought to how it would affect _her_. 

Jacobi had asked her, before they left the shop, if she wanted to interface with it there. They had a back room for it, one of the employees had told them, only half of a leer on his face. She could try a few of them on, see which one felt like a perfect fit.

But the thing is - Hera had known. The moment she saw it. It _wasn’t_ the Hephaestus, because she would never have that again. But it was the closest thing that she’d get to perfect out of one of these things.

“That one,” she had breathed, and Jacobi stopped, cocked his head at it, made a considering face, then let out a quiet chuckle. 

“Yeah,” he told her. “That one looks just your size.”

Now though, she’s regretting her decision to take it home and try it on there. 

Her new body is all of five feet, three inches tall and has spindly arms and legs that refuse to cooperate with her. Minkowski’s bedroom is dimly lit, which hadn’t seemed like a problem when Jacobi had gone downstairs to give her some privacy, but is proving difficult now that she actually needs that light to see. The first thing she’s going to upgrade are these damn eyes. How humans function without night vision is beyond her.

Somewhere downstairs, a door opens. The sound of muffled voices reach her, intermixed with the sound of shoes on linoleum and the rustle of plastic bags. She hears Lovelace laugh, loud and bright in the quiet of the space.

Hera, who hadn’t expected anyone back for hours, totters. Her left ankle, which had valiantly held her weight for approximately two minutes and fifty-four seconds, gives out. 

She swears, and goes down like a pile of bricks.

There’s a pause in the conversation downstairs, and then a footstep on the stair. 

“Hera?” Minkowski calls, a note of concern in her voice.

Hera grimaces. One of the arms has somehow managed to fall off. She should have had Jacobi help her after all. 

“Yes, commander?” she calls brightly, willing her voice not to glitch.

Another pair of feet joins the first on the stairs, their steps a touch quieter. That’ll be Lovelace, then. Hera shifts her weight, rearranging her limbs into something that could possibly pass as normal human posture. She’s just… sitting on the floor. Just having a _niiiiiice_ sit. That’s what she’ll tell them. That she did this on purpose.

“Is that-” Minkowski says, and then pauses, rounding the corner. She stops, her eyes widening and Lovelace, coming up the stairs behind her, collides into her with an oath of surprise.

“What the-” Lovelace starts to say, and then she stops too, staring. “Oh, _wow_.”

Hera licks her lips. It’s a strange thing, the texture of lip and tongue. Synthetic flesh, albeit synthetic flesh meant to mimic the real thing, tastes weird. _Tasting_ is weird. Having a _tongue_ is weird. Autonomic nervous tics that she didn’t even understand back when she was a space station are really, _really_ weird. 

“Hi, commander,” she says sheepishly, managing a little wave with the arm that’s still attached. 

“What did you-” Minkowski starts to breathe, her face contorting into- something. Hera doesn’t have a word for the mixture of emotions shifting their way across Minkowski’s face. 

Hera swallows - another weird automatic response that she’s not sure she likes - and says, by way of explanation, “Jacobi took me shopping.”

  
Hera’s new body is perfectly ordinary. Small in stature. Narrow. The edges of her are delightfully sharp, from wrist to cheek to collarbone. Faint freckles dusted across her nose and cheeks - like constellations. Her eyes are the black of deep space.

And her hair? Her hair is the perfect radioactive blue of her favorite star.

  
“I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell us this was something you wanted,” Minkowski is saying earnestly from her spot on the couch. She’s got the corner of a blanket in her lap and is twisting it, tighter and tighter until the fabric is pulled so taut that the fibers are straining at their seams. Hera wants to smooth the wrinkles out of it. She wants to take Minkowski’s hands and pull them gently away. The jerkiness of the movement, the knowledge that the blanket - old and worn ragged in places and obviously loved dearly - may come out of this permanently flawed is making Hera anxious.

Instead of doing any of that, she sits on the other side of the couch across from Minkowski, avoiding her eyes and trying to stay as still as possible.

Lovelace is in the kitchen, peeling an orange. She’s quiet, watching things unfold like she’s thinking about interfering. Hera wishes that she would. It would be easier than trying to explain herself.

“I just,” she starts, and then stops, grimacing. She really doesn’t want to finish that thought, so instead, she says, haltingly, like a question, “You were busy?”

Jacobi, who’d been banished from the house after the initial shouting match broke out, would have been really helpful right now.

“No, wait-” she says quickly, panic making the core of her go unsteady as Minkowski’s expression twists - going quiet and yes, a little hurt. “That’s not what I meant! I just- I didn’t want to disturb you! You’ve both been so busy and Eiffel is still recovering and Jacobi- I mean, he just _offered_. And I didn’t know that it was something I really wanted until we were... there.”

She stops, her chest, so new and strange, heaving. She doesn’t need to breathe, but it moves in automatic response - something about cooling fans and her processor not overheating. She certainly feels like she’s overheating, her throat tight. Is it supposed to do that? Is the body faulty? Or are all of these human mannerisms they’ve hardwired into her making her go crazy?

“But it was something that you wanted,” Lovelace says, taking a bite of orange. It’s not quite a question. Hera, in her old body, would have been able to see the fine spray of mist ejected into the air as Lovelace’s teeth tore through the fruit’s flesh. In this body? She can’t even zoom in to see it better. At this juncture, she’s not too sure what she wants.

Hera hesitates. And then she sighs. 

“It’s an adjustment,” she admits, shifting her hands in her lap. They’re small hands, with square palms and short fingers, but they’re tipped with nails as hard as diamond. She’s planning on painting them the same radioactive blue as her hair. “But... I do want to try it for awhile. Just to see.”

They’re quiet, and for a moment, she’s afraid that she’s done something wrong. That maybe she should have gone to them with this instead of just waiting patiently in the storage box out back. 

“You know,” Lovelace says quietly, taking a seat at one of the bar stools. She leans back against the counter, regarding Hera with thoughtful eyes. “This is your fight, too.”

Hera flinches.

“But I’m not-” She cuts herself off with a quiet, abortive noise, and swallows thickly, unable to make her mouth form the word ‘human.’

Lovelace’s eyes narrow. “You’re right. You’re not. But Hera, neither am I.”

“We thought that you liked the quiet,” Minkowski says, her hands finally still in her lap. The blanket is twisted, the fabric warped, but even with these eyes, Hera can tell that the wrinkles can still be smoothed out.

“I do,” she says, because it’s true. The quiet of the box had been nice at first, a lot like her first days on the Hephaestus, before Minkowski and Eiffel and Hilbert had arrived. But after a few days, it had gotten lonely. “I did.”

Lovelace breathes deep, steady. Her hands are still pulpy with orange.

“All right,” Lovelace says, after a long minute. “Ground rules. You have _got_ to talk to us about this kind of stuff. And we’re… well, we’re going to try to do better too. This is your fight. You can be involved in it however you want. And if you don’t want to be involved? That’s okay, too.”

“We want you to be happy, Hera,” Minkowski tells her, leaning forward to take Hera’s hand. “You’re our family.”

“And family means that no one gets left behind,” Hera whispers absently. Her chest _aches_. She wonders if they’ve given this android- this new body of hers- working tear ducts. It might feel nice to cry.

Minkowski lets out a wet sounding laugh, and her grip on Hera’s hand tightens. 

“Right,” she says thickly. “Or forgotten.”

“Can we-” Hera starts, and has to stop, throat working, and swallow hard before she’s able to continue. “Can we _please_ go visit Officer Eiffel?”

Something in their expressions go soft, and Lovelace pushes off of the bar stool and crosses the room, taking a seat on the other side of Hera, so that the two of them have effectively boxed her in. Their knees knock together.

“That sounds like a really good idea,” Lovelace tells her. She smiles crookedly, her own eyes a little wet, and lays a hand over both of theirs, squeezing tight. "What do you think, Minkowski? Up for a little road trip?"

Minkowski sighs. "I suppose I'm driving?"

Doug Eiffel did not, strictly speaking, need to be held in a hospital. There wasn't a damn thing that the scientists at Cape Canaveral could do for him and there _definitely_ wasn't anything that the doctors in Houston could, besides monitor him to make sure that there weren't any unforeseen consequences to having a knockdown, drag out fight take place inside your brain. But Minkowski and Lovelace had insisted, just in case.

The wing that he's being held in is the long term care unit, which is ever so slightly more palatable to the senses than the main floor. Doug has a very nice private room, complete with a bed, a window, a shelf for his books, and even a private bathroom. 

Hera still hates it.

Hospitals are too bright. From floor to ceiling, everything is a fluorescent white that seems designed to offend the human eye. It reminds her too much of lab coats - of Pryce and being held in a very different box. It feels like a prison. 

When they arrive, Eiffel is sitting up in bed. He's got a tablet cradled in his lap, and as Hera watches, his brow creases into a frown. 

"Oh thank Sweet Baby Jesus and all the other Christmas Critters, I thought 1800 hours would never get here," a familiar voice is saying, tinny voice echoing up from the speakers. "Worst sixty minutes ever."

Hera feels like she's been kicked in the throat.

It doesn't take him long to notice them, straightening up and flicking the tablet off with a quick swipe of his thumb when Minkowski and Lovelace push through the door behind her. He blinks twice, his big dumb brown eyes wide with surprise, and then he smiles. It is exquisitely painful, seeing that smile on that face and knowing that he doesn't know her anymore. That he'll never call her sweetheart again. That they'll never stay up late talking about anything and everything. So much of her world is filled with ghosts of Doug Eiffel, and here she is, standing right in front of him and he still doesn't even know her.

"Hey, gang," he says, and she- she crumples a little. She misses him so much that it _aches_.

Her legs go right out from under her, and dimly, she's aware of Lovelace catching her under her arms with an oath of surprise. But her eyes, her new eyes, that he had no part of helping her pick out, are focused on him. Only him. 

"Hera?" he asks her, halfway off the bed, his expression twisted with alarm, and oh. Oh, okay. He- he knows her.

That's- that's all right, then. 

"I'm okay," she says, taking a strange bracing breath that she doesn't need. She pushes away from Lovelace on shaky legs, first one step, then two. 

"I'm okay," she says again, when she's standing in front of Eiffel. He looks small, dressed in a mint-green hospital gown, shrouded in thin white sheets. He still has the half-assed beard he'd grown on their trip back to Earth.

She takes a seat on the end of his bed, uncomfortably aware of Minkowski and Lovelace's eyes on her.

"I uh," she says, clearing her throat. "I missed you."

Eiffel stares at her, so she lets herself carry on, even if it makes her uncomfortable.

"I lived in a box for a week," she tells him, making her new lips form a rough approximation of a smile. It's surprisingly difficult. "I thought it was okay, but it wasn't. And then I got this body and it feels _weird_ and I don't know if I like it yet, and I want to ask you what you think, but you're not you, and that's- that's _my_ fault. And I just-" she takes another deep breath, the framework of her chest expanding and the fans inside of her kicking into a higher gear, and then finishes in a wobbly sort of voice, "I really missed you. I _miss_ you."

Well, would you look at that, she thinks, staring at him through a film of liquid, they did install tear ducts in this thing, after all.

"Hera," Minkowski says, and Hera flinches.

"I miss you," Hera says again, gasping a little. "And I know that's not fair, but I miss my best friend. And all I want to do is ask for a _hug_ , because you said once that they were the best thing about being human and I- I can't just ask that-"

Eiffel's brow wrinkles. "Yes, you can."

She stops. "What?" 

"You can ask that," he tells her, shifting a little on the bed so that he's facing her. His face is stupidly earnest. Endearing. He looks so much like her Doug Eiffel. Sounds so much like her Doug Eiffel. "It's pretty easy. Watch. Hera, do you want a hug?"

Hera lets out a little noise, something that isn’t quite a sob, and nods, jerkily.

He smiles at her, and she-

Maybe he _can_ be her Doug Eiffel again. She might not ever know what he was going to say to her in those last few moments, not really. He might never remember their time on the Hephaestus. He might never call her sweetheart again. Might never quote Star Wars. Might never complain about missing coffee or go on incomprehensible rants about Deep Space Nine. But this Doug Eiffel, at his core, is just as kind and impossible as hers was. 

And, she thinks, as he wraps his arms around her, pulling her close, he was right about one thing. The best part about having a body is definitely this. This moment, right here, where Hera feels inexplicably safe and warm and _held_. 

Maybe she’ll give this new body a chance. Just for a bit.


End file.
